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maw

1,323 karma · joined April 4, 2007

Michael.

Bostonian by birth, Melburnian by conviction, Chilango for a lack of other options.

maw at pobox.com

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maw··on Show HN: I wrote an email app that accepts only one sender per inbox
I used to do this when I could, but many poorly written email validators reject such addresses. (One service, Rappi, was so gloriously, hopelessly broken that they spammed me now and then at the address with a + in it but I couldn't use it to log in!)

Now I just use Fastmail's masked address feature. (And I do not use Rappi.)

maw··on Formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem
I have discovered a truly marvellous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow bear the load.
maw··on Tim Cook Sold Out Steve Jobs (2025)
That is not the economics textbook sense of the phrase.

The first sentence from the wikipedia article seems good to me: "R-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth."

maw··on Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
maw··on Tarsnap is cozy
I use restic + rclone to back up to onedrive, where I have 1TB space included with my subscription.

My main backups are on rsync.net, though.

maw··on Converting a Git repo from tabs to spaces (2016)
A codebase that's formatted notgivingashittily is an accessibility issue. It's not just deranged control freakism.

Maybe Yelp's codebase was otherwise clean, but aside from golang projects (and the Linux kernel) I've come to associate tabs with unreadable slop code. Maybe your experience is different.

maw··on Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash
And what about the people who sometimes post interesting things and sometimes post distilled insanity? They're incentivized to do so.
maw··on The narrowest escalator in New York City
I have memories of a similar escalator, probably at or near Downtown Crossing.

I don't remember it being made of wood, but I remember it being narrow and slanted downwards and kind of scary. Come to think of it, the station in general was very run down and a bit frightening to ~5yo me.

This would have been in the early to mid eighties.

maw··on Piranesi's Perspective Trick (2019)
Indeed. It made long walks with my dog seem all too short.
maw··on Un Ministral, Des Ministraux
But are these truly exceptions? Or are they the result of subtler rules French learners are rarely taught explicitly?

I don't know what the precise rules or patterns actually might be. But one fact that jumped out at me is that -mal and -nal start with nasal consonants and three of the "exceptions" end in -val.

maw··on Cargo Airships Are Happening
That makes it make more sense. Thanks.

You're right that there are big regulatory issues still.

maw··on Cargo Airships Are Happening
If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer on the other, you can actually beat today’s air freight service on delivery time.

I didn't understand this part, specifically how you could beat today's air freight. Why wouldn't airships be subject to the same (ahem) overhead at either end?

Competitive enough on speed while being less expensive makes sense, though.

maw··on Layman's Guide to Python Built-in Functions
Fortunately his surname is not Deacon.
maw··on Parse, Don't Validate (2019)
Whenever this comes up, I'm reminded of section 5 in https://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html which among other things says "Don't parse" and "there are two types of command interfaces in the world of computing: good interfaces and user interfaces".

If I were were to teach a class about programming in the medium (as opposed to in the small or in the large), I think I'd assign my students an essay comparing and contrasting these suggestions. Each has something to teach us, and maybe they're not as contradictory as it may seem at first.

maw··on Show HN: A Modern Palletization App
I tried to make some sort of joke or pun based off of shipping containerized software, I couldn't make it work. Oh well.
maw··on Do you still count on your fingers?
What's wrong with the poem?

  Thirteen days have November
  April, May, and December.
  All the rest have thirty nine
  except for February when the weather is fine.
Works for me.
maw··on Show HN: BandMatch – “Tinder” but for finding musicians to create bands/collab
How do you know that there's a drummer at your door? The knocking speeds up.
maw··on New paintings found at Pompeii
It's mentioned in the first sentence of https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%A0%CE%AC%CF%81%CE%B9%CF%82, the first sentence in the corresponding English article, and early in the corresponding pages in other languages that I checked.

I chased a few references and found the following:

The Iliad: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Hom.+Il.+3.16&...

Hyginus, in Latin: https://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost02/Hygi...

I assume there's more.

maw··on New paintings found at Pompeii
I'm not really sure what you're getting at. A lot of figures in mythology have multiple names. Paris/Alexander was one -- but today he's far better known as Paris.

The characters used to write Αλεξανδρος (no accents back then!) are interesting to me. I associated that style of script with much later times. Shows what I know.

maw··on Fear makes you a worse programmer (2014)
> That pseudo-library style is kind of what "unit test" originally meant: a business unit, not a code unit. Examples simplified it too much and people copied the style instead of the substance, and the original meaning was lost.

Very interesting. It sounds a bit like what happened with the term "Hungarian notation".

maw··on Original photo from Led Zeppelin IV album cover discovered
That's a lot more than four sticks.
maw··on Confusing Git Terminology
Believe it or not, I enjoy writing documentation.

I imagine it as a competition between myself and an adversary with an uncooperative attitude, one who's prepared to act smarter, dumber, better informed and more ignorant than I am in order to to find gaps, inaccuracies, or ambiguities in the docs I write.

It doesn't hurt that it improves my understanding of whatever it is that I'm documenting -- and where it could be improved.

maw··on Why Is the Django Admin "Ugly"?
What are Trader and VC UI? I searched for them and once I got specific enough I got this comment as the first result.
maw··on Gothub: Alternative front-end for GitHub written with Go
What's the point of this? Github's UI seems reasonably well done and reasonably responsive to me. And it's not like you're removing a dependency, which is defensible.

I'm probably missing something here - what?

Now, if there were something like this but for Gitlab, whose UI is distractingly slow and just plain weird in a lot of ways, then I'd be very interested.

maw··on Why does email development have to suck? – Explaining all the <tr>'s and <td>'s
I read the first paragraph and it seemed about right to me: there are many standards at play and many implementations of varying quality; lots of folklore, possibly false, makes the rounds and some of the more important providers are, by reputation at least, known to be difficult; one has to deal with issues of scale and stability and atomicity and reliability; there's spam.

In other words, no shortage of interesting if often maddening problems to work on here.

Then I saw that this was all just about formatting HTML mail.

Oh.

maw··on The Odyssey by Homer, Translated by Samuel Butler
And her translation of the Iliad comes out later this year. I've been looking forward to it ever since I found out she was working on it.
maw··on America Has Too Much Pork
Half a decade? Hasn't it been going on for well over 40 years by this point?

On the bright side, it seems like fewer and fewer people take it seriously.

maw··on Go with PHP
Thanks for this. This is something I kind of knew but would have been hard pressed to articulate, especially on the spot. Seeing it laid out like this is very useful.
maw··on Intranasal vaccine confers broad mucosal and systemic immunity against SARS-CoV2
I don't know about other countries but in Mexico they gave out Cansino and Sinovac among many others.

I count myself fortunate to live in an area where they were administering A-Z.

maw··on Cistercian Numerals
Until someone makes a Cistercian display automatic wristwatch I'm not interested.
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